Normally some kind of theme, however vague, can be discerned between
the three shows in any given batch at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre. However,
I confess that as regards the opening selection for this autumn's season,
I can't see it. One could make tenuous claims that they all involve varying
flavours of mental extremity and death, but on the whole it is better to
consider each presentation quite independently of its fellows.

For once, the most grotesque and extreme of the trio is not in the Circle
Studio, and is not directed by Jon Pope. Pope treads a measured path through
Arthur Miller's Two Way Mirror pair of two-handers: in Some Kind
Of Love Story, a private detective trying to free a man jailed for
murder is strung along one more time by the woman he has been in thrall
to for years, and who happens to suffer from multiple personality disorder;
in Elegy For A Lady, a well-heeled gentleman seeks to buy what is
probably a farewell present for his dying mistress. Anne Marie Timoney
turns in a beautiful brace of performances as the cracked former (and possibly
current) whore and the seller of high-class gifts respectively; Tristram
Whymark is generally more measured as the gentleman in the latter play,
tending towards over-demonstrative New York-Italian gesturing as the Irish-American
detective.

The weird stuff is downstairs, in Kenny Miller's Stalls Studio production
of Eric Bogosian's Funhouse. When Bogosian first began to attract
attention on this side of the Atlantic, in the early 1980s, he was looked
on more as a character comedian than a dramatist, and this 1983 collection
of three- to five-minute monologues shows why: although many of the laughs
are uncomfortable, the consistent strategy is to use humour to satirise
the clutch of character types on display, from the black-rubber fetishist
to the grasping televangelist via the instructor in torture techniques
and a dozen or so points between. Stephen Scott begins fully encased in
rubber and ends almost naked, writhing on a floor pasted all over (as are
the walls and ceiling) with photocopy dollar bills. It is a bravura performance,
but the material has grown dated as we have become blasé about such nutters
and unsavouries.

Blithe Spirit, although by now clearly a period piece, has not
grown likewise stale. Consequently, there is no need for Philip Prowse
to have updated the text as he has the setting, with references to Paul
Daniels, Muzak and the late Elvira having died of laughter when watching
Songs Of Praise on TV. It is, though, a delicious touch to make
Charles Condomine's mobile phone play the tune of Irving Berlin's "Always",
the song which helped bring back the ghost of Elvira to haunt him and his
second wife Ruth.

Andrea Hart's Ruth is from the first a domineering rather than a wheedling
figure. Sophie Ward's Elvira is cool throughout, motivated always by malice
more than playfulness; however, thanks to Prowse's design and his directorial
insistence that Ward keep entering by stepping down over the couch from
the upper stage level, Ward – even in bare feet – keeps making most un-ethereal
clumping noises. Prowse also skimps (until the set-piece of the closing
minute or two) on otherworldly special effects, but as the link to the
dimension beyond the veil, Ellen Sheean's Madame Arcati is a particular
delight, in her cycling helmet and chinoiserie, a pheasant feather
sticking straight forward out of her hair as a kind of mediumistic dowsing
rod. Her performance would be superb in any production of the play, but
is not quite enough to carry this one.